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There’s a new and particularly clever piece of malware in town called WireLurker, and rather unusually it targets iOS and OS X. Even more remarkably, WireLurker is surprisingly virulent, possibly already infecting hundreds of thousands of iOS and OS X users. While OS X malware isn’t that rare, it’s almost unheard of for iOS to be susceptible to such attacks — and no, even if your device isn’t jailbroken, you can still be infected.

Last night, an Antares rocket exploded 14 seconds after launch. No one was harmed by the explosion, though the launch site will have sustained significant damage. We don’t yet know the cause of the explosion, but I’m sure that Orbital Sciences’ decision to use ancient (but refurbished) Russian NK-33 rocket engines will come under a lot of scrutiny.

Roku is well known as one of the better streaming media players in the market, and for the first time you can now save yourself a step and buy an HDTV with the Roku experience baked in. The 40-inch model now runs just $298, the lowest price it’s been since it debuted.

Over the last week, it has emerged that Verizon Wireless has been silently tracking around 100 million mobile customers using a supercookie that can’t be opted out of. The tracking cookie, as you can probably guess, allows Verizon to track almost everything that you do on the internet, and then sell that behavioral data to advertisers. Even worse, get this: Verizon’s implementation of the supercookie is so sloppy that any third party can also use the cookie to track your behavior.

Remember the big PS4 2.0 firmware release that shipped earlier this month? Well, it turns out there is a bug in this update that can prevent the PS4 from waking properly from rest mode. Affected users are being required to hard boot their systems, and that could potentially cause major problems. There’s no official word on when we’ll see a bug fix, but thankfully there is a workaround for the time being.

Many technology fans, including DARPA think that brainlike neuromorphic chips bleeping digital spikes at each other could provide the answer to autonomous vehicle control — if only someone knew what exactly should generate the spikes they use. The latest brainstorm, before turning over the keys of life to these chips, is to put them into drones and see what happens.

Google’s co-founder and CEO, Larry Page, has admitted that it’s time to find a new mission statement. The company’s mission, ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,’ along with its motto of ‘don’t be evil’ — both coined more than a decade ago, in more peaceful times — seem idealistically quaint in a new era of robotics acquisitions, anti-monopoly investigations, and research into indefinite life extension and other futuristic biotech.

It’s that time of year again! The smell of gun powder and Doritos is in the air, and that can mean only one thing: Call of Duty. After the disappointing next-gen debut of Call of Duty: Ghosts last year, all eyes are on Sledgehammer Games to see if the franchise will return to form. Based on early analysis, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is exactly what fans have been waiting for, but there are some notable technical compromises on the Xbox One and PS4.

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